The beauty of heaven has been repeatedly depicted by artists, writers and poets have described, even people who are very far from art, stare into this alluring abyss, admire it, not finding either words or sufficient emotions to express those feelings that stir soul and mind. The height attracts a person in any role, it is beautiful with its crystal blue smoothness, its raging streams of white-gray clouds, replaced by light interspersed with cirrus clouds or lush cumulus “lamb”, are no less attractive. And no matter how melancholy the cloudy sky may look, enveloping with its depth, deafening and crushing with the whole mass, it also causes a storm of emotions and emotions, inspiring thoughts on a special wave.
The beholder sees beauty
Each person perceives the world in his own way. For some, it is gloomy and gray, while others, on the contrary, see only a blossoming, green, colorful planet. Also, we unequally evaluate the heavens above our heads. If we take into account a person with the usual color perception, then he will see the sky as it is considered to be - blue, gray, pinkish at sunset, smoky-gray at dawn.
In fact, these colors are just what our eyes and brain can convey to us. People’s eyesight is easiest to perceive a cloudy sky gray. In clear weather, we have endless azure above our heads, but in reality the atmospheric dome is closer to the violet hue when viewed from the side of the Earth.
In this publication we will find out why the sky is gray on a cloudy day and what the saturation of this color depends on, we also learn how its color changes throughout the day and year and what affects these processes.
Abyssal Ocean Above
Over the territory of European countries, the sky in the warm season usually strikes with its rich blue tint. Sometimes it can be said about him that it is blue-blue. However, if you devote at least one day to what is happening above our heads and carefully observe the natural processes, you will notice a gradation of color, which changes very much from the moment the sun rises and until it completely sits down.
In summer, the sky seems so clean and visually high due to low humidity, the absence of a large number of clouds, which, accumulating water, gradually fall closer to the ground. In clear weather, our gaze does not even look hundreds of meters ahead, but at a distance of 1-1.5 km. Therefore, we perceive the sky so high and bright - the absence of interference on the path of light rays in the atmosphere helps to prevent refraction, and the eyes perceive its color to be just blue.
Why does the sky change color
Such a change is described by science, however, not so picturesquely as by writers, and is called diffuse radiation of the sky. Speaking in a simple and accessible language for the reader, it is possible to explain the processes of color formation of heaven in this way. The light that emits the sun passes through the air gap around the Earth, it scatters it. More simply, this process occurs with short-wavelengths. During the maximum rise of the celestial body above our planet, at a point located outside its direction, the brightest and most saturated blue color will be observed.
However, when the sun sets or rises, its rays travel tangentially to the surface of the Earth, the light emitted by them, a longer path must be taken, and therefore they are scattered in the air to a much greater extent than during the day. As a result, a person perceives the sky in pink and red in the morning and evening. Most of all, this phenomenon is visible when there is a cloudy sky above us. The clouds and clouds then become very bright, the glow of the setting sun colors them in stunning crimson colors.
Thunder steel
But what is a cloudy sky? Why does it become so? This phenomenon is one of the links in the water cycle of nature. Rising up in the form of steam, water particles fall into the atmospheric layer with a lower temperature. Accumulating and cooling at high altitude, they are interconnected, turning into drops. At that moment, when these particles are still very small, beautiful white cumulus clouds appear before our eyes. However, the larger the droplets become, the more in the clouds of gray.
Sometimes, looking at the sky through which these huge "lamb" swim, you can see that one part is painted gray, the others even acquire a steel thunderous hue. Such a transformation is explained by the fact that the drops in the clouds have different sizes and shapes, and therefore they refract light differently. When the sky is completely cloudy, it is completely painted in mouse-gray tones, only white light reaches us.
Vast smoky spaces
There are days when the gray cloudy sky does not have a single lumen. This happens when the concentration of clouds and clouds is very high, they envelop the entire visual space in the sky. Sometimes they are perceived as a huge pressing mass, ready to collapse on the head. Moreover, this phenomenon is most characteristic demonstrated in the fall and winter, when the air temperature is low, but the humidity, on the contrary, is high and is at the level of 80-90%.
On such days, clouds are very close to the earth's surface, they are located just a hundred or two meters from it. The description of the cloudy sky often has melancholy and depressing notes, and this is most likely connected with the sensations that arise when you feel alone with this gloomy whopper, ready to fall on you with rain and cold.
And everything could be different ...
What tones the sky plays depends on the intensity of light radiation and the wavelengths reaching the planet, so in winter even on clear days it is bluish-blue. But the closer the spring and the higher the position of the sun, the brighter its blue, especially in the days when the haze is dispersed in the upper atmosphere, distorting the ingress of light.
Scientists have found that on other planets the sky may not have the usual blue and gray colors for us, on Mars, for example, it is pink even at the height of daylight hours.